Radical Measures

“You don’t consider yourself a capitalist?” Anderson Cooper, of CNN, asked Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, in October, at the first Democratic Presidential debate. Sanders gave a look suggesting that Cooper had just asked him to put on a black-silk top hat and play the Monopoly man. “Do I consider myself part of the casino-capitalist process, by which so few have so much and so many have so little, by which Wall Street’s greed and recklessness wrecked this economy?” Sanders said. “No, I don’t.” Cooper, who wondered how “any kind of socialist”—Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist”—could win a general election, asked the other candidates if they weren’t capitalists. Hillary Clinton smiled and said, “When I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started,” and she talked about reining in the excesses of capitalism while honoring it as an engine of middle-class growth. It was a well-crafted answer, both mainstream and appropriately progressive. Later in the debate, when Sanders declared that America was “sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” making the uproar over Clinton’s private server sound ridiculous, she beamed. Her comfort seemed complete.

Yet any pleasure that she might have taken in finding her competitors, this time around, to be a seventy-four-year-old socialist and a tremulous former governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, dissipated last week. At the time of the first debate, Clinton was eighteen points ahead of Sanders in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls, with forty-three per cent to his twenty-five. Now the gap has narrowed to eight points. In Iowa, which holds its caucus on February 1st, the two are trading off the lead in recent polls. In New Hampshire, which votes eight days later, Sanders is ahead by six per cent. He could win both races. Just as telling as the numbers is the enthusiasm level—the large crowds he attracts, the “Feel the Bern” buttons, the twitter love fed by a campaign organization that is tougher, more tightly run, and more tech-savvy than expected. Democratic voters under the age of forty-five prefer Sanders by a margin of about two to one, according to a new Times/CBS poll. Iowa and New Hampshire will be followed by Nevada and then by South Carolina and several states in the Deep South, where Clinton is expected to do well, thanks to the support of African-American voters. Still, last week Sanders told CBS that he thought Clinton’s campaign was getting “very, very nervous.”

“I’m not nervous at all,” Clinton said on Wednesday, on the “Today” show, but, she added, “it’s time to draw some contrasts.” On Tuesday, Chelsea Clinton, campaigning for her mother in New Hampshire, took a question from a teacher at Miss Porter’s School (Jacqueline Bouvier’s alma mater), whose pro-Clinton students were in need of a talking point to counter their Bern-feeling contemporaries. “Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare,” Chelsea said. That could “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.” Politifact rated the assertion “mostly false.” Sanders has proposed a single-payer system that would automatically cover everyone. He calls it “Medicare for all,” which may be wildly impractical, but it is not the same as Medicare dismantled.

Hillary Clinton also tried to portray Sanders as “a pretty reliable vote for the gun lobby,” even though the N.R.A. gave him a grade of D-minus. Her charge is based largely on Sanders’s 2005 vote for a measure that made it harder to sue gun manufacturers and dealers; he has said that the liability small dealers faced was too broad. Last week, Vice-President Joe Biden told CNN that Sanders’s position on guns was now in line with President Obama’s. Biden, being Biden, went on to note that he considered Clinton to be something of an arriviste in the fight against income inequality, adding fondly that “no one questions Bernie’s authenticity on those issues.”

After the New Year, Clinton put out an ad with a montage of G.O.P. candidates making alarming statements. (“Bomb!” “Carpet bomb!” “Shut up!” “Repeal!” “Defund!”) “They’re backward, even dangerous,” the narrator says. “So ask yourself: ‘Who’s the one candidate who can stop them?’ ” A picture of Clinton appears. But the electability question can cut more than one way; the public’s populist and anti-establishment mood works against her. And the more extreme the Republicans appear the more plausible Sanders becomes. For all his talk about breaking up the banks, he is less of a radical in the context of his party’s ideology than either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump is in theirs, and he has a far longer and more traditional political résumé—mayor, congressman, senator—than any other candidate. In polls of imagined general-election matchups, Sanders and Clinton both beat Trump.

It is hard to picture Sanders (much less Trump) in the Situation Room, but, if Democratic voters were to feel as liberated from the constraints of prudence as their Republican counterparts seem to, anything might happen. We could have a radical from Brooklyn and a real-estate guy from Queens facing off in debates that would sound like nothing so much as an argument on the B41 bus as it barrels down Flatbush Avenue to Kings Plaza.

Yet the puzzle remains of how Sanders is running so strongly for a major-party nomination in the United States when he has willingly associated himself with a word—“socialist”—that not long ago was considered disqualifying, the stuff of loyalty hearings. It may be that it was so taboo that its meaning has become obscure, or open to reinterpretation. Sanders points to Scandinavia; there is no more Warsaw Pact. According to Merriam-Webster, “socialism” was the most looked-up term in its online dictionary in 2015. (The runner-up was “fascism.”)

The radical Republicans may also have normalized the word by applying it so promiscuously. A viewer of Fox News may be forgiven for thinking that we have already elected a socialist President. Ben Carson says that Barack Obama’s housing policies are “failed socialism.” Cruz calls Obama an “unmitigated socialist.” Marco Rubio, in the debate last Thursday, said that the President “doesn’t believe in the free-enterprise system.” At an event in November, though, Rubio corrected an audience member who seemed to confuse Sanders’s socialism with Cuba’s Communism. “What I appreciate about Bernie, he’s not trying to sugarcoat this,” Rubio said. “He’s honest about it.” In the year of Trump, how much is that worth? ♦

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.